And yet, the conversations that have arisen along the campaign trail have been uniquely fundamental to our democracy -- reaching beyond the usual aridness of politics and policies to issues that many Americans carry in their hearts every day.

Much of what some people dislike about Rawls-- the aridness, the detachment from history and psychology, the characteristic Americanness of his uninterest in plumbing the depths of the soul-- is precisely what made his work a success in the way that it was.

Had it been possible for her to love again, she would have felt the change in her nature far less; but with the stream, the fountain also had dried, and she was conscious that an aridness, unpleasant and unnatural, threatened to desolate her soul, and her conflict with this had been the hardest battle of all.

A palaeontologist, perhaps; and yet, interesting as fossils were, there was something about them, a slight and cramping aridness, as though her imagination was being squeezed into a dark hole, too small for its bursting wings.

He soon became the friend of the family; and finding in me, as he was pleased to say, a person free alike from the extravagance and emptiness of the great world, and from the narrowness and aridness of the still world in the country, he courted intimacy with me, and ere long we were in one anothers confidence.